Burton Kendall Wheeler (February 27, 1882 – January 6, 1975) was an attorney and a American politician of the Democratic Party in Montana; he served as a United States Senator from 1923 until 1947. He returned to his law practice and lived in Washington, DC for his remaining years.

Wheeler married Lulu M. White. They had a daughter, Frances, who died in 1957. She had helped her father with his research for his autobiography, which he published in 1962 and dedicated to her and his wife.[citation needed]

Wheeler ran as a Democrat for the Senate in 1922, and was elected over Congressman Carl W. Riddick, the Republican nominee, with 55% of the vote. He served a total of four terms and was re-elected in 1928, 1934, and 1940. He broke with the Democratic Party in 1924 to run for Vice President of the United States on the Progressive Party ticket led by La Follette. They carried one state—La Follette's Wisconsin—and ran well in union areas and railroad towns. He returned to the Democratic Party after the election, which Republican Calvin Coolidge won in a landslide.

As tensions mounted in Europe, he supported the anti-war America First Committee. As chair of the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee, Wheeler announced in August 1941 he would investigate “interventionists” in the motion picture industry. Wheeler questioned why so many foreign-born men were allowed to shape American opinion. "Critics charged that the Committee was motivated by animus to Jewish studio heads."[4] Representing the Studios was 1940 Republican Presidential candidate Wendell Willkie who charged that Wheeler and other critics sought to impose the same kind of censorship that Nazi Germany was enacting all over Europe. Wheeler also led the attack on Roosevelt's Lend Lease Bill charging that if passed it would "plow under every fourth American boy". Roosevelt in response charged that Wheeler's statement was "the damnedest thing said in a generation".

After the start of World War II in Europe, Wheeler opposed aid to Britain or the other Allies, already fighting in the war. On October 17, 1941, Wheeler said: "I can't conceive of Japan being crazy enough to want to go to war with us." One month later, he added: "If we go to war with Japan, the only reason will be to help England." The United States Army secret Victory Plan was leaked on 4 December 1941 to Wheeler, who passed this information on to three newspapers.[2][5]

Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, Wheeler supported a declaration of war saying, "The only thing now is to do our best to lick hell out of them."[6]

Wheeler sought renomination in 1946 but was defeated in the Democratic primary by Leif Erickson, who attacked Wheeler as insufficiently liberal and for his pre-war isolationist views. Erickson in turn was defeated by Republican state representative Zales Ecton.

Wheeler did not return to politics, nor full-time to Montana, but took up his law practice in Washington, D.C. Aided by research by his daughter, Frances (died 1957), Wheeler wrote his autobiography, with Paul F. Healy, Yankee from the West, published in 1962 by Doubleday & Company. He dedicated the book to his wife and daughter. He died in Washington, D.C., aged 92, and is interred in the District of Columbia's Rock Creek Cemetery.[7]

David George Kin wrote and published The Plot Against America: Senator Wheeler and the Forces Behind Him, a political pamphlet against Wheeler during the 1946 campaign by supporters of the Communist Party USA. It accused Wheeler and Harry S. Truman of being part of a fascist conspiracy.[9]

In an earlier, lesser-known alternate history novel, The Divide by author and cartoonist William Overgard, Wheeler becomes President in 1940, campaigning on a platform of isolationism despite huge victories by the Axis in that year (far larger than those which actually occurred). As a result, when the U.S. belatedly finally enters the war, it is defeated and partitoned as spoils between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan; Wheeler is ultimately executed as a war criminal.

Anderson, John Thomas. ”Senator Burton K. Wheeler and United States Foreign Relations” PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, 1982

Johnson, Marc C., “Franklin D. Roosevelt, Burton K. Wheeler, and the Great Debate: A Montana Senator's Crusade for Non-intervention before World War II”, Montana: The Magazine of Western History (Winter 2012) 62#1 pp 3–22